Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Captain America and Black Widow (Chris Evans, Scarlett Johansson) are sent on a mission to liberate S.H.I.E.L.D. hostages, but soon find the entire organization threatened from all sides. The filmmakers’ purpose was to fuse a 3D superhero movie with the trappings of 1970s paranoia thrillers, with Robert Redford serving as a bridge. An ingenious idea, and it gets off to a very entertaining start, with good location work in D.C., including an adrenaline-packed attack against S.H.I.E.L.D. boss Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson). Johansson also raises the temperature, but the new characters are less interesting. A strictly formulaic finale fails to live up to everything that precedes it… but this is still more ambitious than most Marvel films.

Last word: “We love action films. So this was something we always wanted the opportunity to do. And then we just went to all of the great influences on us and we would show them to the crew and talk about, you know, ‘How do we get this feeling like the bank heist in ‘Heat’?’ To me, it’s like eight minutes of the most intense filmmaking I’ve ever seen. So for the causeway sequence in this movie where Winter Soldier attacks Cap and Natasha and Sam in the car, we want the feeling of the heist from ‘Heat’. We want that camerawork and that energy. Or the car chase with Nick Fury. You know, that’s a combination of DePalma, that tension where you’re putting a character in an impossible situation and the audience is going ‘How the hell is he gonna get out of this?'” (Joe Russo, Slash)

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A blog on movies & TV, Hollywood and beyond.

I studied film at Halmstad University and practical filmmaking at the New York Film Academy. Now I'm a critic for the Swedish daily Aftonbladet. Opinions expressed on this personal website are solely mine and not related to Aftonbladet.